REVIEWER: Wendy Donawa is grateful to live on the unceded territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt peoples, and to see the Salish Sea and the Sooke Hills from the window over her desk. Our Bodies’ Unanswered Questions is her second collection.
Poet Wendy Donawa
unpacking the poem:
Regional reviewers focus on regional poems
Reviewer Wendy Donawa unpacks a different poem every month. She examines the poem in a way she hopes is helpful for readers and other poets to understand how craft works in a particular poem, for a particular effect.
march 2024: Marlene Grand Maître
“How Far You Live”
from your animal body. It sleeps
in you, faint quiver of sinew.
Your tamed mouth
the architect of a word fortress
the carnal can’t scale.
Through a window, you watch a spotted fawn burst
from behind the viburnum, rush its mother, and latch
onto a teat, whole body a muscular suckling music.
How to inhabit your animal body, awaken your howl:
Climb out from under grief’s landslide. Roll in anger’s mud.
Watch everything through wonder’s raptor eye. Mark your territory—
brush against the big-leaf maple, red-osier dogwood, evergreen huckleberry.
On your knees, all tongue and snout, pick up the scent of cougar scat,
nibble miner’s lettuce, creeping blackberry; hunt violet webcaps, shaggy manes
and fat jacks. Unfurl your ears to a murder of crows feasting on an anthill,
to the swoosh of great blue heron wings lifting from a koi pond.
Your heart drums, eager to be off leash. Press your pelt against another’s for solace,
for desire’s surge and ebb. Glutted, stumble into hibernation’s torpor. Wallow.
Marlene Grand Maître has had two chapbooks published: Cancer’s Rogue Season (Frog Hollow Press, 2020) and Wild Kin (Raven Chapbooks, 2023).
Her poetry has won contests, been published in many literary journals and in ten anthologies, most recently in Worth More Standing (Caitlin, 2022). Her poems have been longlisted for Best Canadian Poetry in English, and been nominated for a National Magazine Award.
Unpacking “How Far You Live” by Marlene Grand Maître.
This poem can’t wait, frontloading its urgent theme into the title, which flows right into a warning: “How far you live/ from your animal body.” The first brief stanza’s verbs barely move: they “sleep”, even the sinew’s quiver is “faint”, the mouth “tame”. But how would we have a civilized society if we didn’t tame our most violent words and actions, build a “word fortress” of restraint?
And who is the “you” of the poem? Is the speaker admonishing the reader? Is she talking to herself? Or to a society whose passions are so repressed they atrophy, or so unacknowledged they become harmful and dangerous?
In contrast, the second stanza’s urges (witnessed, although only through a window, at a remove) are expressed in high-action verbs: “burst”, “rushed”, “latched”. This short stanza is filled with kinetic energy, and the “tamed mouth” of the first stanza becomes a “whole body’s…muscular sucking music.”
Let’s look at the physical layout of the poem, notice the shape of the black text in white space: the narrow huddled shape of the first stanza expands into a spacious wider life-force,
then bursts into the the wild third stanza. The unassailable word fortress is now inhabited; “how far you live /from your animal body…” has become “how to inhabit your animal body.”
Action verbs are used and all the senses are evoked in lavish images of the natural world, and of the body’s hungers. The carnal world in all its power, beauty, terror is available for “solace”, for “desire’s surge and ebb”, full to the point of glut and wallow. The reader is immersed in a riot of colour, texture, smell, pushed to learn the animal’s sensuous responses, to “watch everything through wonder’s raptor eye”. Nothing tidy or polite here: “Roll in anger’s mud…Mark your territory”, smell and taste everything, “all tongue and snout”. Opening to the animal within is not without its dangers: landslides, raptors, cougars, an eat-or-be-eaten world. But a life with its grandeur and beauty—the “swoosh of great blue heron’s wings lifting”, “your pelt against another’s”.
Who would choose to return to the quivering life of “tamed mouth”, and “word fortress” that keeps the carnal at bay?